Low-bit-rate digital speech coders based on the code-excited linear prediction (CELP) coding principle generally suffer from signal sparseness artifacts when the bit-rate falls below about 0.5 to 1 bit per sample, leading to a somewhat artificial, metallic sound. Especially when the input speech has environmental noise in the background, the low-rate artifacts are clearly audible: the background noise will be attenuated during active speech sections. The present invention describes a noise insertion scheme for (A)CELP coders such as AMR-WB [1] and G.718 [4, 7] which, analogous to the noise filling techniques used in transform based coders such as xHE-AAC [5, 6], adds the output of a random noise generator to the decoded speech signal to reconstruct the background noise.
The International publication WO 2012/110476 A1 shows an encoding concept which is linear prediction based and uses spectral domain noise shaping. A spectral decomposition of an audio input signal into a spectrogram comprising a sequence of spectra is used for both linear prediction coefficient computation as well as the input for frequency-domain shaping based on the linear prediction coefficients. According to the cited document an audio encoder comprises a linear prediction analyzer for analyzing an input audio signal so as to derive linear prediction coefficients therefrom. A frequency-domain shaper of an audio encoder is configured to spectrally shape a current spectrum of the sequence of spectra of the spectrogram based on the linear prediction coefficients provided by linear prediction analyzer. A quantized and spectrally shaped spectrum is inserted into a data stream along with information on the linear prediction coefficients used in spectral shaping so that, at the decoding side, the de-shaping and de-quantization may be performed. A temporal noise shaping module can also be present to perform a temporal noise shaping.
In view of conventional technology there remains a demand for an improved audio decoder, an improved method, an improved computer program for performing such a method and an improved audio signal or a storage medium having stored such an audio signal, the audio signal having been treated with such a method. More specifically, it is desirable to find solutions improving the sound quality of the audio information transferred in the encoded bitstream.